Networking devices and servers are notoriously difficult to program. Technical courses and even college degrees are devoted to the topic, and every year millions of dollars are spent ensuring that information technology specialists gain the technical knowledge needed to deploy and configure networking devices and servers on computer networks. Technologies for developing dynamically generated HTML pages, such as PHP and Active Server Pages (ASP) may be used to implement specialized functionality for management of web traffic, however these technologies are also complex, and development costs are high.
It is known in the networking arts to configure a Server Load Balancer (SLB) to read an incoming request and route the incoming request to a target server based on the URL or a header component of the request. However, SLBs merely function to direct in-bound requests to a suitable server, and direct server responses back to the correct clients. SLBs are not capable of modifying any aspect of a request, such as the URL or header. Further, SLBs are not capable not of modifying response headers, nor reading or modifying response content. This limits the utility of SLBs to being traffic directors, and prevents them from being used to manage network traffic in a manner that alters the URL, headers, and content of the requests and responses that flow through these devices, according to user preferences.
It would be desirable to provide a simple and effective system and method for configuring a networking device to manage network traffic between clients and servers according to a set of user-specified rules.